Smoke and Mirrors

by Deborah Lake

  In 1908, Sanders moved on. He joined the J.J. Craig Company, whose sailing barques roamed the southern waters. He went to the Marjorie Craig and followed it up with the Louisa Craig, before finishing with the Joseph Craig. The shipwreck became an omen. The Great European War needed him. He volunteered for the Navy.

  Thomas Crisp was at sea when war came. Skipper of a company fishing smack, the 61-ton wooden ketch George Borrow, he worked out of Lowestoft. At 38 years of age, Crisp was well respected, with an intimate knowledge of the waters he worked. He needed it. Skippers who did not find fish soon found themselves on the beach.

  Crisp was not a wealthy man. Fishermen, even skippers, who worked for wages rarely were. Scarcity commands high prices. Fish were no rarity in East Anglian seas. Four days on the water, one at home, month in, month out, year in, year out, produced a modest wage to sustain an equally modest life.

  Tom Crisp never wished to be anything other than a seaman. Born on 28 April 1876, he had four brothers and two sisters. As with many children brought up in seaports, the quayside proved a magnet. Tom skipped lessons to roam the waterfront, a practice that led to his summary transfer to a school that was a decent distance from the bustle of the dock.

  As soon as he left school, Tom Crisp went to sea. He began on a drifter that fished the Irish Sea. After a few years hauling in mackerel and herring, he took a job as third hand on a Lowestoft sailing smack.

  Wider horizons beckoned. Tom Crisp became a blue-water man. He sailed the Atlantic run between London and New York for two years before marriage called. On shore leave, he met Harriet Elizabeth Alp, a fisherman’s daughter from Aldeby, a small village on the Norfolk Broads. In 1895, they married and settled at Burgh St Peter, 6 miles across the marshes from Lowestoft. Tom returned to the sandbanks and their tricky currents. He became a mate, then gained his skipper’s certificate. Every trip, he trudged 6 miles to work. At its end, he plodded 6 miles home for a single day off.

  In 1902, he joined the Chambers company as skipper of their newest boat, George Borrow. In 1907, the Crisp family moved to Lowestoft, moving every couple of years as their fortunes slowly improved. By 1914, the family lived unpretentiously with the help of a small extra wage. Crisp’s eldest son, also Tom, served as a 15-year-old apprentice alongside his father on George Borrow.

  Harold Auten of the Royal Naval Reserve was gazetted as sub-lieutenant a mere two months before the German armies crunched into Belgium, Luxembourg and France. He was born on 22 August 1891 in Leatherhead, Surrey. After formal education at the much-respected Wilson’s Grammar School in Camberwell, the 17-year-old joined the Peninsular and Oriental Line as a cadet in 1908.

  The ‘Exiles’ Line’, as Rudyard Kipling called it, monopolised the lucrative trade to India. They had the government contract for first- and second-class passages. No third-class or steerage traffic sullied P&O cabins. They carried suave diplomats, anxious missionaries, bland civil servants, nervous subalterns, choleric majors, ascetic bankers, wide-eyed world travellers, the occasional maharaja and, at regular intervals, unmarried ladies. The last, collectively known as ‘the fishing fleet’, went to hook a husband in the bachelor wilds of the Raj. If they failed to catch one, they were less affectionately called ‘returned empties’ on the homeward leg.

  Like other major British shipping lines, P&O modelled its uniforms on those of the Royal Navy. Merchant officers and seamen could, at a quick glance, be mistaken for their regular equivalents. The companies encouraged their officers to join the Reserve. Membership added a decent social cachet, always welcome on expensive liners. P&O, in particular, considered itself a most superior line. Its captains were generally reckoned to be responsible only to God and the company directors, although not necessarily in that order.

  Auten became a midshipman in the RNR in 1910, the year in which he graduated from his cadetship with P&O. By 1914, he was a deck officer. Then came the war.

  William Williams was an Anglesey man. He was born on 5 October 1890, at Amlwch Port, his father a dock worker and fisherman. Neither job paid well. William grew up in a family where money was always short. Educated at the local school, he escaped as soon as he could to go to sea.

  Williams served on two three-masted schooners, the Camborne and Meyric. Neither was large. Camborne, built at Amlwch, displaced a mere 108 tons. Williams sailed in her under the command of Captain Thomas Morgan. Meyric was the bigger ship, coming in at 253 tons. With her, Williams went to Rio Grande in Brazil. Confusingly, but not surprisingly on an Anglesey vessel largely crewed by local men, the captain was also a William Williams.

  Williams, 6ft tall, strong, a hard worker, earned his rating as a thoroughly reliable and totally satisfactory seaman. He was at sea when the war started. He knew where duty led him. He went to the Royal Naval Reserve as a seaman.

  Shore facilities at Scapa Flow hardly existed. The shore canteen, popular rumour claimed, owned one trestle table, ten wooden chairs and three barrels of beer. For men and officers, life on board or ashore proved monotonous. Petty Officer Ernest Herbert Pitcher, serving in the dreadnought battleship HMS King George V, part of the Grand Fleet, considered life should offer more to a career sailor.

  Pitcher was born on the very last day of the year in 1888 in Cornwall. His father, George, served in the coastguard. Ernest was still an infant when George and his wife Sarah moved to the coastguard station at Swanage in Dorset.

  After the usual round of lessons at the local board school, Ernest satisfied the examiners that he could read, write and calculate simple sums to the required standard. Armed with his school-leaving certificate, he joined the Royal Navy as a boy on 22 July 1903 to become a gunner. When King George V cleared for action against the High Seas Fleet, Ernest Pitcher would be an integral part of her fire-power. In the meanwhile, he watched the gulls and hoped for battle.

  Ronald Neil Stuart was a deck officer with the Montreal Ocean Steamship Company, generally known as the Allan Line, in 1914. Born on 26 August 1866, he was the only son of Neil Stuart, a master mariner, and his wife, Mary, herself the daughter of a master mariner. He had five sisters. As the only boy in the family, he was fussed over at every opportunity.

  His father had sailed the Australia route from England. The first child was born in Quebec and, after a series of occupations, the family returned to Britain, where they settled in Toxteth, Liverpool. Neil Stuart set up as a grocer with a line of ‘prize teas’. Mariners and shop counters are rarely a successful amalgam. Neil decided to return to sea but died in an accident before he took up his appointment.

  The family suffered in genteel poverty. Ronald left school for a hated office job with dismal wages. He loathed both his job and Liverpool. Salvation came from an aunt who helped him gain a maritime apprenticeship. In 1902, Ronald Stuart, son and grandson of master mariners, went to earn his living on great waters.

  He joined Steel & Company’s barque Kirkhill. The seas introduced themselves forcibly in 1905 when Kirkhill argued with a rock off the Falkland Islands. The barque went down and Stuart lost every possession he had. Not long afterwards, he endured another shipwreck, in which his vessel capsized in fearsomely bad weather near Florida. Seafaring is not for the timid.

  His apprenticeship served, Ronald changed employers. He went to the Allan Line, a Scottish-Canadian company with a thriving immigrant trade between Scotland and the Dominions. With them, Ronald Stuart sailed the world. In August 1914, he decided that he must join the Royal Navy.

  The Royal Navy had plenty to do. Although the Grand Fleet, snug in its northern fastness, manoeuvred, exercised, and prayed for the High Seas Fleet to offer battle, the remainder of the service had its hands full as Britain went to war.

  On 12 August 1914 the British Expeditionary Force began its move. For eight days ships ferried troops, guns, horses, wagons, lorries, fodder and rations to France. The Royal Navy guarded the Channel Approaches against German destroyers, German battleships, German cruisers and German U-boats as the British Expeditionary Force
went to France. It was a job they would have for four long years.

  The new concept of distant blockade allowed the Royal Navy to claim one particular distinction. An unknown gunlayer on HMS Lance, a spanking new destroyer that entered service in February 1914, fired the first shot in anger from the British side.

  The war, for the British, officially began at 2300hr on 4 August 1914. Even before the Whitehall ultimatum expired, Königin Luise, a German auxiliary minelayer, left Emden under the command of Korvettenkapitän Karl Biermann for the mouth of the Thames. She had clear orders. ‘Make for sea in Thames direction at top speed. Lay mines near as possible English coasts, not near neutral coasts, and not further north than Latitude 53°.’

  A former excursion steamer on the Hamburg to Heligoland run, Königin Luise received a hasty conversion for her wartime role. Time ran out before her main armament was in place. Similarly, her promenade deck still boasted huge glass windows through which happy holidaymakers had gazed at rolling waves. Two raked masts, two raked funnels gave the steamer a look very similar to a Great Eastern Railway ferry on the Harwich to Hook of Holland route. Hastily applied good German paint, black on the hull, buff on the upper works and yellow topped off with black on the funnels, matched the standard GER scheme.

  The first morning of the war, misty, damp, cold, saw a swarm of Royal Navy destroyers sweep north from Harwich. Their task was to harry any German shipping they might find. HMS Amphion, an Active Class light cruiser, led the flotilla from Harwich towards Heligoland.

  A British fishing boat alerted a destroyer to some strange behaviour. An anonymous steamer was ‘throwing things overboard’ about 20 miles north-east of the Outer Gabbard, a position conveniently close to the Harwich to Hook of Holland route.

  At 1025, Amphion sighted the unknown through dull rain. She sent the two Laforey Class destroyers HMS Lance and HMS Landrail to investigate. The Königin Luise made off at a handsome 20 knots, disappearing briefly with the help of a sudden rain squall. At 1030, Lance opened fire. Minutes later, Amphion joined the fight.

  Biermann had no reply worth considering. A solitary pair of 3.7cm pom-poms failed to deter two hungry destroyers and an eager cruiser. The Germans fired helpless rounds from revolvers and rifles to no avail. His ship hit time and time again, Biermann decided to scuttle rather than surrender. At 1222, Königin Luise, on fire, damaged, rolled over to port and went down, the first casualty of the war. Some 46 of the 100 crew on board survived.

  Amphion and her followers continued their hunt. They soon sighted another steamer, almost identical in appearance to their first victim. The destroyers wanted more flesh, a desire much increased when they saw an enormous German flag fluttering from the new target.

  Fortunately for the German Ambassador, Prince Karl Max Lichnowsky and his entourage, Captain Cecil Fox of the Amphion recognised the vessel. She was the St Petersburg, a GER steamer, taking the diplomats back to their homeland.

  Fox called off the destroyers that had already opened fire. Their blood was up. They ignored the signals from their leader. Fox hastily put Amphion between them and St Petersburg. Even the most ardent destroyer captain took heed of that manoeuvre.

  At 2100, Amphion and her flotilla turned for home. At 0645, the cruiser hit one of the mines laid by Königin Luise. The explosion broke the ship’s back. The mine almost completely destroyed the bridge, and devastated the forecastle and messdecks. Men died at breakfast, including most of the twenty-one prisoners the Amphion had taken on board.

  Fox stopped engines. Fighting the raging fires that raced through the forward part of the ship proved a hopeless task. Down by the bows, the Amphion was a dead vessel. Cecil Fox ordered his men to abandon ship. The destroyers hurried to collect the boatloads of survivors. Although Fox had stopped engines, ships have no brakes. Amphion continued to move in a circle, striking another mine as the last sailors scrambled clear. Her magazine went up in an expanse of yellow flame. The remains of HMS Amphion slid under the water at 0705. Her sinking claimed the lives of 151 men.

  Staff Paymaster – the equivalent of a lieutenant commander – Joseph Theodore Gedge attracted the sombre credit of being the first British officer to die in the war. Over the next days, telegrams expressing the Admiralty’s deep regret went to Mabel Tolcher in Plymouth, now the widow of her leading seaman husband; to the parents of 17-year-old Private Jerome Cann, a Marine, who joined from the tiny village of Trevena, in Cornwall. Boys on Post Office bicycles delivered telegrams to Newton Abbot, to Argyll, to Ballymena, to Birmingham. War’s sacrifices came early to some.

  No German vessels attempted to interrupt the flow of men and supplies during the heady days of August when the British Expeditionary Force crossed the seas to France. Nobody believed that the Germans would attack unarmed transports. That was the mark of the barbarian. Henry V may have slaughtered unarmed prisoners at Agincourt but that was after the French had attacked the old men, women and boys who worked the baggage train. Oliver Cromwell, it was true, had slit tongues, hacked off ears and noses of similarly unfortunate wagon drivers and wives. But that was all a long time ago. Civilisation had advanced since those days of barbarity. A few more imaginative souls did see periscopes behind every wave top, but the U-boats were not there. The speed of the British deployment had caught Berlin by surprise. It also caught out the German field commanders. They believed that the BEF was still assembling on the very day that the first field-grey patrols met men in khaki.

  Like the Grand Fleet, the High Seas Fleet moved to its war deployment before hostilities began. The Germans had the advantage of foreknowledge. On 30 July 1914, the Erste Unterseebootflottille followed the giant battleships through the Kiel Canal. The nine boats of the First Flotilla sailed directly to Heligoland. On 31 July, U 5, U 7 to U 10, U 15 to U 18 began to patrol. They did not go far. In the daylight hours, they anchored among the sandbanks to the east of the island. Each evening, they returned home. Their sole duty was to give warning of the anticipated mass onslaught by the Grand Fleet.

  For the German navy, the recently adopted British scheme of distant blockade came as a surprise. When no grey silhouettes appeared on the horizon, thoughts turned to the U-boats. They could make a reconnaissance with every chance of evading detection.

  On 6 August 1914, ten U-boats set out to find the Grand Fleet. They left Heligoland at 0430 Berlin time, twenty-six hours after British submarines left Harwich to probe the defences of the High Seas Fleet.

  The German boats, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Helmuth Mühlau, were the most aged in the U-boat fleet. U 5, U 7, U 8, U 9, U 13, U 14, U 15, U 16, U 17 and U 18 were the pioneers. Shepherded by the light cruisers SMS Hamburg and SMS Stettin and two destroyers, S 99 and S 135, which acted as wireless relay centres, the ten boats travelled 80 miles into the wastes of the North Sea before their escorts bade them ‘Gute Reise und viel Glück!’ The escorts turned for home. The boats went on.

  Simplicity dominated the plan although it was divorced from reality. As with the German air service, the U-boat planning came from staff officers who had yet to understand the limitations of the men and machines of the new technology. The boats were to go north, line abreast, 7 miles between each boat, as far as a line drawn on the chart between Scapa Flow and Hardanger Fjord in Norway.

  What is perfectly feasible on the unruffled surface of a maritime chart is less so in wind, rain, darkness and enveloping cloud. Navigators on U-boats had little experience in the use of chronometers for celestial position-finding. Bad weather toppled gyrocompasses. Needles swung wildly on magnetic compasses. Maintaining a predetermined course and speed became impossible.

  After two days, Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddigen in U 9 turned back with a faulty clutch on one engine. A defective compass caused some excitement when U 9 found herself 220 miles adrift of track off the Jutland peninsula instead of at Heligoland.

  Kapitänleutnant Johannes Lemmer of U 5 hobbled home, his mission unaccomplished. With one engine out of action, he retired to Hel
igoland at low speed.

  Kapitänleutnant Richard Pohle found himself, after two days at sea, off Fair Isle. His boat, U 15, was over 100 miles west of the planned position. Three British battleships, the dreadnought HMS Ajax and two super-dreadnoughts, HMS Monarch and HMS Orion, engaged in gunnery practice, were within range. Pohle dived, stalked Monarch and fired a torpedo. It disappeared into the white caps of the ocean but the lookouts saw it. The three massive ships, each costing a fraction under £2 million to build, left hurriedly. Pohle, back on the surface, presumably checked his position, for he was well to the east the next morning.

  Mist lay across a gently swelling sea when HMS Birmingham saw a U-boat on the surface at 0340hr. U 15. Hammering sounds drifted across the water as mechanics tried to right a fault. Pohle was helpless as Birmingham first opened fire with every gun she could bear and then turned, her funnels belching, as she went to maximum speed. She caught Pohle’s boat squarely in the middle to slice her soul in two. Eight weeks earlier, the 5,440-ton Birmingham was a welcome guest at the Kiel Regatta. U 15, a mere 512 tons, died. Pohle and all hands perished. Friends in peace, friends for ever.

  The remaining boats, having seen nothing of the Grand Fleet, eventually turned for home. One vanished. The unfortunately numbered U 13. Kapitänleutnant Hans Artur, Graf von Schweinitz and his men never returned. U 13, sister boat to U 15, came from the same Danzig yard. The dead from the 2 boats were the first of 4,716 men to die in the Kaiserliche Marine’s underwater arm.

  A loss rate of 20 per cent is hardly good news, but they were old boats, powered by the less-than-perfect Körting engines. When four MAN-diesel boats went out on 8 August to seek a mythical collection of British capital ships covering an even more mythical landing of the BEF at Calais, Dunkirk, Ostend and Zeebrugge, each one returned home safely.